While O’Donnell laudably tried to target the audience’s interest onand hopefully last, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen under for great, I was overtaken, not from the pulling on the thread, as well as the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me sad, it made me angry.
With regards to celebrities, we are able to be a heartless region, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Beach. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It could be grating to pay attention to complaints from individuals who get pleasure from privileges that the majority of us can’t even think of. For those who can’t muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who tends to make a lot more funds to get a day’s deliver the results than many of us will make in the decade’s time, I guess I can not blame you.
With the rapid pace of events on the web along with the information and facts revolution sparked through the Internet, it’s really simple and easy for your technological innovation business to assume it is special: repeatedly breaking new ground and carrying out things that no one has at any time executed earlier than.
But you can get other kinds of business that have by now undergone many of the exact same radical shifts, and have just as good a stake while in the future.
Take healthcare, as an example.
We regularly consider of it as a significant, lumbering beast, but in fact, medication has undergone a series of revolutions with the previous 200 a long time that happen to be at least equal to people we see in engineering and info.
Less understandable, but still inside the norms of human nature, would be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and have a look at the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but with the blithe interviewer Sheen’s lifestyle as we pass it within the perfect lane of our everyday lives. To be truthful, it may be difficult for folks to discern the distinction involving a run-of-the-mill attention whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its individual merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It is Labeled as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be expected to consider the complete measure of someone’s everyday living every last time we listen to something humorous.
Swift forward to 2011 and I'm endeavoring to examine means of currently being a little more business-like about my hobbies (generally music). Through the finish of January I had manned up and started off to promote my blogs. I had created quite a few different weblogs, which had been contributed to by associates and colleagues. I promoted these activities by way of Facebook and Twitter.
2nd: the minor abomination the Gang of 5 around the Supream Court gave us a yr or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) basically includes a tad bouncing betty of its personal that may pretty well go off from the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Since this ruling extended the idea of “personhood” to both companies and unions, to strive to deny them any appropriate to operate within just the legal framework that they were organized below deprives these “persons” for the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which means (once once more, quoting law school educated household) that both the courts need to uphold these rights for your unions (as individual “persons” as assured from the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights must utilize to main corporations, also.
Marco Arment, the former CTO of the Tumblr blog platform, is best known these days for his time-shifting reading app Instapaper. But he could start a side-job as a financial advisor to start-ups. His motto: Get the money from your customers, not investors.
Arment’s more traditional take is built largely on the idea that if he puts out a good product, there’s no shame in asking customers to pay for it. And the more they pay, the less he needs to rely on outside investors. Arment said many developers are of the mindset that they need to amass a huge number of eyeballs through free services. But they don’t focus enough on building a solid product that can command loyalty and payment from consumers, and instead try to gain profitability through advertising and turning to outside venture capital.
By contrast, Arment says his efforts to monetize Instapaper have been successful because he was able to leverage the hard work he put into his paid versions and the good will he’s gotten back from consumers. And that has allowed him to avoid outside funding, something he plans on doing for the forseeable future.
Don’t Take Funding if You Don’t Need It
“If a service can be profitable and breakeven without VC money, you don’t need to take it,” Arment told me in an interview. “There’s no reason for developers to get a lot of users without charging. There’s another path. My goal is to spread that message: Charge for something and make more than you spend.”
Arment launched Instapaper as a free website in January 2008 and became profitable later that fall when he first began selling a paid iPhone app alongside a free version. He’s been profitable ever since. Arment won’t disclose his revenue, but he said he can cover his expenses and can afford to hire a couple more people if he needed. He left his Tumblr job in September to devote himself to Instapaper.
Though Arment maintains a free iPhone app, he said the focus of the company has been on the paid versions which are updated first (a new update is expected in the next month or so). He has yet to release a free iPad version and has only gotten three emails about the lack of it. Most seem happy to pay for the $5 iPad version. Between 25 and 33 percent of people pay for the $5 paid iPhone version. In fact, as an experiment, he pulled the free iPhone app from the app store for a week a little while back and found that only one person emailed. Sales of the paid version didn’t go up, but they didn’t go down either, he said.
“The free version isn’t really competing as much as I expected with the paid version; a lot of people go straight to the paid version,” he said. “It was only a week but the people who were going to the free version would not have gone to the paid version.”
Let Users Thank You by Paying You
That’s what’s allowed Arment to really focus on the paid segment. In fact, he still questions the value of the free version at times because it can leave a more negative impression for users with its limited set of features. Arment said his paying users have surprised him with their support. He started a $1 a month subscription plan in October that didn’t actually offer much in the way of extra features. It was more of a way to let users show their support for Instapaper. He said the response was overwhelmingly positive.
“That was a huge surprise to me how well it’s doing given there’s no real incentive to do it besides good will. But it ends up that good will is powerful,” Arment said. “It shows that people will pay for something they like because they want to ensure its future.”
Arment is testing the theory again with a new API that leverages his subscription plan. For developers who want to build apps with Instapaper integration, Arment said last month he will require their users to subscribe to Instapaper. Again, the response has been very positive, said Arment. Two hundred developers have applied to get access to the API. All this money-making has allowed Arment to sidestep venture capital money. He has had repeated offers, but Arment said accepting VC funding is akin to taking on a new boss, and the act of raising and maintaining money is a full-time job, he said.
Venture Capital Is Like Having Another Boss
“If you can go without funding, you can be a one- or two-person shop without a whole level of bosses,” he said. “You’re not worried about getting more money and getting diluted anymore.”
Arment’s approach doesn’t work for everyone. He was fortunate to be able to this as a side job and build it up while at Tumblr. And he acknowledges that the lack of funding could be a problem if he wanted to build a staff quickly. But he believes his experience shows that a more old-school approach to building a business and developing a following with consumers is a viable one for entrepreneurs that should be explored more. He may not the biggest company, but he can be a profitable one for a while.
“I don’t need the entire market,” Arment said. “I can get five percent of the market and be rich.”
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
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Meet Buddy Roemer, who hasn’t won an election since the 1980s and lost to America’s most famous neo-Nazi. McKay Coppins talks to the ex-Louisiana governor about his White House dreams.
Buddy Roemer is the kind of politician who likes to use your first name in conversation—a lot.
“That’s a good question, McKay!” he exclaims when I ask him why he decided to become a Republican halfway through his first and only term as governor of Louisiana. “You gotta stop asking these questions!”
Previous LA Gov. Buddy Roemer is considering running for President. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Unfortunately for him, that will be one of the easier queries he faces in the coming months, as he tests the waters in a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination in 2012. Roemer hasn’t won an election since 1987. As governor, he became something of a state joke when he entrusted his emotional well-being to a new-age guru who instructed him and his staff to ward off negative thoughts by snapping a rubber band on their wrists and saying, “Cancel. Cancel.” And his only real claim to national fame is losing his bid for re-election to the statehouse in a primary to a veritable neo-Nazi. But today, none of that is preventing him from exploring a White House run.
“Thursday, I’m announcing an exploratory committee,” he says in a cheerful New Orleans accent, making him only the second Republican candidate so far to officially declare his intentions. (The other is pizza magnate Herman Cain.) “And then I will proceed to explore, to think through, to listen to people—I call them plain people—throughout America.”
It’s easy at first to dismiss Roemer as a kook—or, worse, a cynical opportunist looking to cash in a brief, buzzy presidential run for a future book deal or a cushy cable gig. But while his stated campaign strategy is hugely untenable—more on that below—he insists his intentions are sincere. And, well, maybe he’s telling the truth.
“Many will say that ‘he doesn’t have a chance,’ that ‘he’s not to be taken seriously,'” he says, pausing for emphasis and then lowering his voice. “Watch me, McKay.”
So far, Roemer’s platform is thin. He doesn’t have a lot to say about entitlement reforms or Middle East engagement. Instead, Roemer, who served seven years in the U.S. House, appears to be putting all his eggs in one basket, and betting that the message will resonate among populists in both parties. His target: something he calls “the money monster.”
“People are asking, ‘Why are you coming back?’ And I say it’s because there’s a need here. I am unimpressed and frightened by the money culture in Washington…
“Many Congressmen are auctioning themselves off for retirement. You have a health-care bill without any tort reform. I wonder how that happened. You have a financial-regulation bill that doesn’t require major banks to follow the same rules as every other company. Gee, I wonder how that happened.”
His bid to free Washington from the grips of the money monster will start with his own campaign. Roemer says he will refuse to accept donations from corporations, PACs, or special-interest groups, and that he will limit personal donations to $100 per individual. Slate’s Dave Weigel has already pointed out that such an approach to fundraising will make it all but impossible to raise enough cash to launch a credible campaign—but Roemer is ignoring the naysayers.
“I will declare my independence from the ‘all I want is access’ money,” he says proudly, insisting that this is more than just campaign window garnish. Indeed, he says, “I happen to think this is key to fixing most of the problems that are ailing America.” It’s a bold claim, and I press him to outline specific policy proposals that will solve the problem. At first he demurs—“That’s for future times,” he says—but then, as though the thought is just occurring to him, he offers, “When Congress sees the success I have with my own campaign, they will turn and say, ‘How did you do that?’ and ‘How does that work, and how does the Internet work?’ I’m not going to dictate to them.”
Robert Mann, a professor of mass communications at Louisiana State University, and a one-time reporter who covered Roemer when he was in Congress, says the politician has always relished being perceived as a "maverick." As a conservative Democrat, he was one of the first members of the House of Representatives to cross party lines and work with Ronald Reagan. And, later, as a governor hoping for re-election he switched parties because, Mann speculates, "he saw that the state's politics were trending conservative, and he thought it would be easier to be re-elected." (Roemer, on the other hand, insists he switched parties to add partisan variety to the Democrat-dominated state. He points to Gov. Bobby Jindal's election as a success made possible, in part, by his own political trailblazing.)
Of course, this independence comes with some baggage that may not smell so rosy to GOP primary voters. As governor, Roemer vetoed an anti-abortion bill because, he says, it "didn't do enough to protect the life of the mother." And he has a record of supporting environmental regulations that will surely be viewed with suspicion by the party's more adamant climate skeptics.
But while Roemer's maverick persona has a mixed track record of electoral success, Mann says he still has the intuition of a good candidate. "If there's a politician that could talk a bird out of a tree, it would be Buddy Roemer," says Mann. "There's a refreshing quality to his rhetoric, and a freedom that comes with not being beholden to any party."
There may or may not be more to Buddy Roemer than an entertaining 20-minute interview. But even if rhetoric's all he's got, he'll still have an important place in the 2012 primary. Namely: on the stage, drawing attention to every other candidate's dance with the "money monster."
McKay Coppins reports on politics and culture for Newsweek.
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